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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26627278">Silver Skins</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/PersianPenName/pseuds/PersianPenName'>PersianPenName</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fairy Tales &amp; Related Fandoms</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, Not sure what to rate it, Old Magic, People die but it's offscreen, Selkies</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 07:07:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,141</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26627278</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/PersianPenName/pseuds/PersianPenName</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff"><p>For Kennesaw, with love</p></div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Silver Skins</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I remember when my mother went back to the sea.</p>
<p>I remember how determined she looked. I remember her pulling the old grey skin over her hair and walking into the waves.</p>
<p>She loved to swim, my mother. She would swim for hours and hours every morning while I went over my schoolwork, and when she came back smelling of salt she would hand me a mussel or a bit of fish and I would swallow it raw at her urging. The flavor of salt-rich blood in my mouth will always be the taste of childhood and care. After she had dried and dressed, I would show her what I’d done, and together we would spend the rest of the day cooking and cleaning and reading and watching television and running errands, and all the rest of the things that mothers and their children do.</p>
<p>They didn’t like my mother, in the village. Her accent was strange, her skin and eyes too dark, her body too unapologetically large. She didn’t go to either of the churches, not even for christmas or easter, and she didn’t swap tea and cakes and visit with the other women while the men were out catching fish. She didn’t integrate herself into the complex web of gifts and favors, gossip and aid that was so necessary for the other families there.</p>
<p>Once a year we cleaned the house from top to bottom. We’d start in the attic, in the dusty corners with flashlights and brooms, going through every box and bag and making sure the marked contents were correct, that there was nothing hidden or forgotten. We’d clean out the closets and beat the rugs, flip the mattresses and scrub the baseboards and I’d ride on her shoulders to wipe down the tops of the ceiling fans. She didn’t swim during those days, only cleaned and cleaned and cleaned with a manic energy that seemed contagious, going over every inch of the house and gardens like she was searching for something.</p>
<p>A few weeks after my father died, they sent the contents of his work locker to us in the mail. It was mostly tools and rope and old boots, papers I didn’t understand and magazines I wasn’t allowed to see. There was also a tacklebox, and at the very bottom a soft, silver skin. My mother cried when she found it, cried like she hadn’t at my father’s funeral, ugly hiccuping sobs that frightened me until I crawled into her lap like a much younger child and let her rock me until we were both exhausted.</p>
<p>That was when she started teaching me to swim. I’d known the basics, of course; you can’t grow up on an island without them, but this was different. She wanted me to swim for longer and longer, into deeper waters and more wild, to start earlier and stay later and never mind the cold. She would pinch my cheeks and tell me I needed to eat more, needed more insulation against the waves, and would bring me more and more gifts from the sea to name and identify and eat without cooking.</p>
<p>On sundays she would drive me to one of the churches in town, and I would get a ride home with one of the neighbors. She wouldn’t enter the building, but I liked to be with the other children for a few hours, and my father had never missed a week. A few weeks before he died, we stayed late while he talked with the priest, who asked me a few questions about being good and believing in god and then poured water over my face and hair and I was baptized. One day I came home chattering about a friend’s upcoming confirmation, and she grimaced and said I would never have to worry about that, that the only water that could claim me was the sea, and I told her about father and the questions and the water and the priest. </p>
<p>I never went back to church after that, and it was later that spring that my mother went back into the sea. She kissed my head before she left and told me that she loved me and to call my aunt and uncle when the sun started to go down.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It was years and years before I understood what had happened. Everyone said that she’d drowned, either on purpose or on accident, that even strong swimmers got overconfident, just another soul lost to the sea. I was enrolled in public school for the first time that year, my short, dark hair (so like my mother’s) brushed and combed and cajoled into growing long and curling. My aunt and uncle didn’t like for me to spend too long outside, said I would get too dark, and they never pinched my cheeks and told me I should eat. They wouldn’t listen about the silver skin, and I learned not to tell them.</p>
<p>Eventually I grew up. I went to university on the mainland, studied marine biology (specializing in invertebrates) and met a boy with laughing dark eyes. Several months later I met his girlfriend, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I needed some time, so I went back home, to my mother and father’s house by the sea.</p>
<p>My daughter’s eyes are wide and dark, like mine. Her hair is thick and short like her grandmother’s, like mine was once before it learned to grow. She was born without a silver skin, sliding slick and salt-wet into my own hands, but I have a plan. I’ve learned from my mother’s mistakes, and I won’t let any other waters claim her. I found where the seals bed down and lured a pup away, fed it the blood-rich flesh that came with my daughter into the world, and dipped my blood-tipped fingers into her mouth after I skinned it. Every day we swim together, her chubby legs kicking at the surf, and she’s had nothing but my milk and fresh fish all the days of her life, bathed in no waters but the sea and breathed no air that lacks salt. She sleeps in her little silver skin every night, and it’s almost spring now, almost the anniversary of when her grandmother took back the freedom that I am denied, but that I will give to my child.</p>
<p>The seals come closer now, watch us as we walk the shore, and I think they are waiting for her. Today we are going to go down to the rocks and tidepools where I’ll give her her final gift, the missing piece that will let her change. I was born without a silver skin, but what skin I have is hers, and I will carry her into the waters and my salt-rich blood, my mothers’ blood, will give her the sea. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>For Kennesaw, with love</p></blockquote></div></div>
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